[Wikimedia-l] Who invoked "principle of least surprise" for the image filter?

[Tobias Oelgarte]

Am 18.06.2012 14:49, schrieb Anthony:
> On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 9:44 PM, Tobias Oelgarte
> <tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com>  wrote:
>> Am 18.06.2012 00:40, schrieb Anthony:
>>> Is there even a way to export an article,
>>> including (recursively) all the templates it depends on?
>> Every stupid bot could do this. There is no "running out of the box"
>> solution at the moment, but the effort to set up something like this would
>> be minimal compared to anything else.
> Have you ever tried to do this?  It's not as easy as you are making it
> sound, at least it wasn't as of a few years ago, because Mediawiki is
> tightly coupled to the specific database structure it uses.
You don't need to interact with the database of Wikipedia itself. You 
can use the MediaWiki API which is quite stable and enough for this 
task. I don't speak about a complete mirror, i speak about a filtered 
_view_ for Wikipedia. You type in "http://www.mysavewiki.com/Banana" and 
the server delivers the recently approved and cached version of the 
article from Wikipedia if "Banana" is whitelisted.
>> I would say that Citizendium failed because they did no automatic updating.
> Well, I'm not talking about why Citizendium failed, as that became
> apparent much later.  I'm talking about why they dropped the
> "progressive fork" parts, which happened pretty early on.  The fact of
> the matter is that forking Wikipedia and cleaning it up is more
> difficult than just starting from scratch using Wikipedia as a
> reference (possibly copy/pasting large portions as you go).
I'm not speaking about a fork or an improved Wikipedia. I speak about a 
restricted and checked view. All article work will still be done on 
Wikipedia itself.
>> What i have in mind is delayed mirror with update control. It is not meant
>> to be edited by hand.
> Yes.  This simplifies some things, and it makes other things
> impossible (e.g. if you want to remove one line from an article,
> you're stuck with removing the entire article; if you want to remove
> one link from a template, you're stuck with removing every article
> which includes that template, or includes a template which includes
> that template, etc.)
>
> And considering the heavy use of templates which are
> Wikipedia-specific, presumably you're going to allow for *some*
> hand-editing.
That would be something else than i had in mind and would extend the 
functionality of the filter (the proposed one) by far. I intended 
flagged revisions together with white listing for a some kind of special 
audience, and not a fork like Wiki that modifies the content (partially) 
itself.

>> It is a subset of the current content selected by the
>> host (one or many users) of the page himself. It is essentially a whitelist
>> for Wikipedia that only contains selected/checked content. That way a
>> "childrens Wiki" could easily be created, by not including any unwanted
>> content, while the effort stays minimal. (Not more effort then to create
>> your own book from a list of already written articles)
> Right, well, I thought this too, until I tried to do it.
>
I was thinking about a first step how someone could look at Wikipedia 
trough a basic filter without the need to interfere with project itself. 
As far as i can see this is the goal of the filter approach while 
eliminating the side effects or to keep them minimalistic.